Snow Leopard only recently exposed the framework needed for Adobe and third-parties to directly access hardware accelerated H.264 GPU decoding.

Unlike LTSP, it uses distributed hardware resources and makes it possible for clients to fully access local hardware, thus making it feasible to use server machines with less power.

Acorn had strongly discouraged BBC Micro programmers from directly accessing system memory and hardware, favouring official API calls.

A computer that uses memory-mapped I/O accesses hardware by reading and writing to specific memory locations, using the same assembly language instructions that computer would normally use to access memory.

Simple DOS applications, which did not directly access the screen or other hardware, could be run.

Acorn strongly discouraged programmers from directly accessing the system variables and hardware, favouring official system calls.

If programs can directly access hardware and resources, they cannot be secured.

This characteristic may cause issues by twice accessing hardware that acts on a write.

None of the environment subsystems can directly access hardware, and must request access to memory resources through the Virtual Memory Manager that runs in kernel mode.

In addition, code running in GameCube mode cannot access hardware unique to the Wii, such as the Wii Remote and the Wii's USB ports.